Black Saturday

7 October 2023, 06:29 · Nahal Oz outpost

It was 06:29 when the Red Alert sirens ripped through the quiet of the Gaza border communities. Saturday. Simchat Torah. Rockets whistled over the fields, the ground shook, and black smoke coiled into a sky that had not yet had time to lighten.

Natalie, a twenty-year-old officer, stood in the outpost's war room. The bars on her shoulders were still new. The screens flickered in front of her, and beside her sat Roni, headset on, eyes on the fence.

"This isn't a normal round," Roni said. Her voice was too quiet.

Shapes appeared on the screens. A lot of shapes. Charges blew through the fence in several places at once. Small drones buzzed over the observation posts and dropped explosives on them, and one camera after another turned to grey snow. On the radio someone shouted "Infiltration," and then another infiltration, and after that there was no need to shout any more.

"Watch your sectors! Report!" Natalie shouted, and her voice broke in the middle.

06:29 · Shati camp

Mehran woke to the launches. At first it sounded like another round, only louder. Then he looked out of the window and saw motorbikes and white pick-ups racing east, towards the fence, men in combat gear standing in the backs, and something in his stomach dropped.

A little later the radio carried the recorded voice of Mohammed Deif, commander of Hamas's military wing: Operation "Al-Aqsa Flood" had begun.

Fatma was already dressed. A nurse at al-Shifa hospital. She knew they would need her, and she knew what would come afterwards.

"You stay here with your father," she said. Her voice was steady; her eyes weren't. "Don't go outside. This is not the time to be a hero."

Ahmed sat at the kitchen table, his ear pressed to the radio, looking like a man who had already lost.

"They think they're liberating us," he muttered. "They've brought death on all of us."

Mehran didn't answer. He knew his father was right. But part of him – the part that had grown up inside a siege, without electricity, without a future, without a way out, the part that had run with the balloons to the fence in the summer of 2020 – felt a spark for a moment when he saw the videos from the fence on his phone. It was a dangerous spark. He put it out quickly, the way you pinch out a match between your fingers, and focused on the equations he knew how to solve: how much food was in the house. How many days the water would last. When the Israeli response would come, and how hard.

He knew that this time was different.

07:00 · Athens

In Athens, Alex woke to vibration. The phone wouldn't stop: alerts, groups, messages from people who hadn't written to him in years. He switched on the television, and for half an hour he didn't move.

Emily woke beside him and saw his face. "What happened?"

"Israel…" He couldn't finish. "They're killing us."

She opened her phone. The videos were already everywhere: pick-ups inside kibbutzim, people being taken by force, the cameras the gunmen wore on their heads. She watched for a minute, and then she couldn't any more. She cried without stopping, her hands shaking.

Then Alex's phone rang. Neta.

He hadn't heard her voice in more than three and a half years. Now he heard her screaming.

"Alex, they're killing everyone! My family's down there by the border and I don't know if they're alive! Matan and a few others were at Nova, at the party!"

She drew a breath and went on in another voice, lower: "And look what Omer Hermesh is writing from Kfar Aza. They're shooting at them there."

He answered, his voice shaking, and tried to calm her, though he had nothing to calm her with.

Emily looked at him. For a moment something hard passed through her eyes – jealousy, fear. Then she saw the screen again, and his face, and understood. She took a deep breath and took his hand.

"Help her," she said. "I'm here."

And they sat like that, three people on two phones, and cried.

07:05 · Nahal Oz outpost

At around seven they were already inside the outpost.

Natalie heard the gunfire coming closer, shouting in Arabic, explosions that shook the floor. Doors slammed. The radio filled with voices calling for help from across the whole sector, from kibbutzim, from roads, from other outposts. Help didn't come. It didn't come for anyone.

She gripped her rifle in shaking hands and gave orders that no longer meant much. They fell back to the small room at the rear of the war room. Roni kept reporting into her microphone, sentence after sentence, the way they had been taught. Her voice didn't shake.

Minutes stretched into hours. Outside, gunfire gave way to silence and then to gunfire again, and someone kept trying the door.

Then the war room filled with smoke.

Something was thrown in, and fire spread. The smoke was thick and black, and within seconds they couldn't see anything. Only the red lights of dead screens, coughing, hands feeling for a wall.

"Roni!" Natalie shouted. "Roni, give me your hand!"

Someone pulled her by the arm. A back door. Air. She tumbled out with a few others, onto her knees, lungs burning, and turned around.

Roni didn't come out after her.

She waited. One second. Another. Smoke kept pouring from the doorway, and the gunfire came closer. Someone dragged her on.

"I'm sorry," she whispered, not knowing to whom. "I'm sorry, Roni."

Midday · Gaza

At midday the streets of Gaza were full of crowds. Some of them were celebrating. Jeeps and pick-ups came back from the fence carrying people who had been abducted – soldiers and civilians, young and old – and sometimes bodies. The crowd gathered round them, shouting, filming.

Mehran saw it only on his phone screen. A young woman in pyjamas, barefoot, led between armed men. The face of a child. He switched off the screen and laid the phone on the floor, face down.

"What have we done," he whispered. He didn't know if he meant Hamas, or Gaza, or himself.

Then he remembered what had been waiting under the stairs for two and a half years: the flare and the orange smoke grenade he had stolen from the fishing boat, for the day he would stand on the terraces at Bloomfield. Now they looked like military gear. Like a target. When Ahmed wasn't looking he wrapped them in a plastic bag, ran through the alleys to the sea, and threw them as far as he could. The bag sank almost without a sound.

Back home he opened his chat with Alex. One of the last messages there was still "Red brother, keep burning." He typed, deleted, and typed again. In English, because in Hebrew he couldn't have written it right.

"I'm sorry. We are not them."

He sent it. One grey tick.

Outside, the sky began to fill with planes.